Our fiftieth year may have come and gone, but we’ve decided that’s no reason to stop programming in San Francisco. The festivities continue at the Untitled Art Fair this weekend, where we’ll be showing Chick Strand’s Soft Fiction, and continue with Sandra Gibson Luis Recoder’s second Prepared Projection Performance at the Exploratorium on the twentieth. Then we’re back at the Roxie for a screening of Gunvor Nelson’s Red Shift and Marjorie Keller’s Daughters of Chaos.

There’s plenty left to see as 2017 draws to a close: Light Field, a celebration of Stan Brakhage at YBCA, Abraham Ravett, Lynne Sachs, and Daniel Eisenberg at ATA + more…

We’re finishing out the year strong. Our favorite new festival Light Field heads into its second year at The Lab this week, with work by Canyon filmmakers throughout and a special Canyon Cinema 50 program on Sunday. San Francisco Cinematheque celebrates the republication of Stan Brakhage’s seminal Metaphors on Vision on Friday. Mark Wilson curates a special program inspired by folk tales and myth at Artists’ Television Access later on in the month, we have another Salon with Jon Jost just around the corner, and the Third Annual Report of Camera Obscura convenes at 16 Sherman for a daylong symposium just before the new year.

One more thing: if you’ve enjoyed Canyon’s programming this year, please consider donating this holiday season. Click here to make a tax-deductible donation to Canyon Cinema Foundation.

The days are getting shorter and 2017 is coming to a close, but there is still a lot of Canyon Cinema 50 programming left to see. Our five-part collaboration with BAMPFA concludes with two screenings that survey the experimental landscape from 1988 to the present day, beginning with Coding and Decoding on Wednesday and ending with a Bay Area premiere of Nathaniel Dorsky’s new work for Silence and Sanctuaries on the 29th. In between, we are joining San Francisco Cinematheque for the second Center of Gravity: Gunvor Nelson & Dorothy Wiley program at YBCA, and traveling to the Roxie Theater for a rare presentation of Chick Strand’s Anselmo trilogy.

One of the themes that has emerged for Canyon Cinema 50 in October is the position of women in experimental cinema, and the vibrant, challenging, and politically engaged work they have produced over the last fifty years. We have four screenings and collaborations this month that attest to this legacy. First up is Romance and Rage, the third Canyon Cinema 50 event at BAMPFA; then we’re back in San Francisco for a presentation of Canyon works from our friends at Other Cinema, a rare screening of Gunvor Nelson and Dorothy Wiley’s Five Artists at the San Francisco Art Institute, and a free evening of women-made films at California College of the Arts curated by Tess Takahashi and Denah Johnston.

September is packed: we’re launching our fall programming with the first two screenings in our Canyon Cinema 50 retrospective at BAMPFA, co-presenting two more SF Cinematheque shows, and inviting Portland filmmaker Vanessa Renwick to the stage for our next Salon. Read on for full details.

Presented in conjunction with the Kadist Art Foundation’s exhibition What We Know that We Don’t Know, and as a part of our ongoing programming for Canyon Cinema 50, we are proud to present Implicit Images, a screening that addresses association and disconnection in semiotics, languages, and senses–what is meant to be seen and what is actually perceived. Featuring the work of Ben Russell, Naomi Uman, David Gatten, and John Smith, the program will be shown four times on Saturday at a location that will be disclosed via email.

Admission is free, but seating is extremely limited. Write to rsvp@kadist.org to reserve your seat.

Program includes:Trypps #5, Ben Russell (2008)Kalendar, Naomi Uman (2008)Film for Invisible Ink, case no. 323: ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST, David Gatten (2010)Associations, John Smith (1975)

Canyon Cinema’s long-running Salon series continues this week with one of our favorite working filmmakers, Mary Helena Clark. She will be joining us at 16 Sherman to present some of her outtakes, real and imagined, alongside work from the Canyon Cinema collection. Structured around Orpheus (outtakes), her 2012 reworking of Cocteau’s Orphée, and a selection material excised from her own recent projects, the program will also include films by Michael Snow, Dorothy Wiley, Joyce Wieland, and others in an evening that promises “relationships by contiguity, resonances, and the connection that becomes the thing itself.”

Free admission. Doors open at 7:00, films begin at 7:30. Show up early to get a seat.

More Canyon Cinema 50 events are being added all the time. On August 12, we are teaming up with Kadist Art Foundation to present a program at Canyon Cinema’s lovely Bayview headquarters as a part of its What We Know That We Don’t Know exhibition. Seating is extremely limited. Details to be announced on canyoncinema50.org.

We’re right on the heels of two nights with Deborah Stratman, plus a panoply of cityscape films selected by former Canyon director Dominic Angerame and a world premiere of a new work by filmmaker Jeremy Rourke.

That was June, and here’s July: a free collaborative screening with the de Young Museum for their Summer of Love festivities, two co-presentations with the 37th San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, and three opportunities to see legendary structural filmmaker Ernie Gehr’s work, new and old.

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Canyon Cinema 50

February 20, 1967 is the day Canyon Cinema Co-op was officially incorporated as a business in San Francisco, CA. For fifty years, Canyon has served as a one of the world’s preeminent sources for artist-made moving image work. We are celebrating this milestone with screening series in the San Francisco Bay Area; US and international touring programs showcasing newly created prints and digital copies; and an educational website including new essays, ephemera, and interviews with filmmakers and other witnesses to Canyon’s 50-year history.